As Australia races towards a federal election likely to kill off the country's current model for a national broadband network, the (probably) outgoing government has released a report saying the annual value of the network to households will be in the order of $AU3,800.

Having built numerous services over the top of what used to just be the World Wide Web, Facebook is now the established platform for plenty of applications. So it pretty much had to happen that someone would find a way to create services that clamber over The Social NetworkTM to subject it to some OTT pain.

Take note Microsoft: when PCs and bandwidth are scarce, services on mobes win

VMware is working on courseware designed to download to and run on mobile phones, as a way of ensuring sysadmins in developing nations can get their hands on the knowledge they need to build virtualised data centres without having to acquire a ruinously expensive PC or leave the bandwidth-poor communities in which they live.

The Raspberry Pi revolution continues, with SolidRun joining the "very small computers for very small sums of money" movement with a bunch of community-supported versions of its CuBox-i miniature computers.

Low-budget Lumia, Asha overhaul needed but lack of apps still a problem

The mega-markets of China and India, and more broadly the rest of the Asia Pacific region, will be key to Microsoft’s success in the handset space with its newly acquired Nokia assets, according to analyst IDC.

Could lose their licences to practise if they control-V'ed from textbook

Three doctors face the withdrawal or suspension of their licences to practise medicine after being accused of releasing an iPhone app which allegedly plagiarised material from an award-winning medical textbook.

The recent El Reg feature on the Compact Cassette's 50th birthday had many a reader commenting on some of the format's former glories. Names mentioned among the dewy-eyed included Aiwa (a favourite in UK studios) and the audiophiles’ choice, Nakamichi, with both producing state-of-the-art recorders with three heads and a lot more besides.

The word on the street is that a backlash from Microsoft's top tier enterprise partners has forced its incentive architects to revisit pending compensation reforms a month before they are due to be implemented.

New released supports high frame-rate 4K TV goodness, and much, much more

Eleven years on from the commencement of work on the first version of the telly connectivity standard, the minds behind the High Definition Multimedia Interface – HDMI to you and me – have taken the wraps off release 2.0 a year later than originally anticipated.

UK mobile network Three has been rapped for touting a tablet computer that customers couldn't actually buy – and then, having got the interested punters on the phone, tried flogging them a more expensive slab instead.

It's all go at the Special Projects Bureau's mountaintop headquarters as we await the imminent delivery of our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) Vulture 2 spaceplane, currently being hewn from the living nylon down at 3T RPD Ltd.

The man brought in to steer the government's crisis-hit one-dole-to-rule-them-all IT system has admitted that the Department for Work and Pension's Universal Credit project has been poorly managed and needs to be completely overhauled.

Xbox buffs can get their mitts on Microsoft’s new console, the One, on 22 November - eight years on from the Xbox 360’s arrival in the US. The console went into “full production” this week, Microsoft claimed today.

With the launch of the "Avoton" Atom C2000 server chips, Intel is putting its second-generation of 64-bit, server-class Atom processors into the field - and what is arguably the first such Atom that is truly designed for modern server workloads.

The juiciest piece of all is the heart and whoever wins, Australia's will be broken

When Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull led the Australian Republican movement, which found itself on the wrong end of the 1999 plebiscite on converting Australia from a constitutional monarchy to a republic, he labelled then-Prime Minister and staunch monarchist John Howard the man who “broke this nation's heart.”

The "Avoton" Atoms for servers and storage arrays and their "Rangeley" variants for networking devices are out and Intel is ramping up the features and carving up the SKUs to try to chase the low end of servers, storage, and networking to take some business away from other chip makers.

At the "Avoton" Atom C2000 chip launch on Wednesday in San Francisco, Intel showed off several of the components of its Rack Scale Architecture working in concert and also announced a partnership with Microsoft to push the idea on its Windows platforms for data centers and on the Windows Azure public cloud.